Musings on music and technology

Sonny Stitt, WordPress 3.3 and Getting out of the Way

Jazz Wax just posted a timely piece on Sonny Stitt on his interesting use of the experimental Varitone or Electric Sax. The goal of this 1965 instrument was to integrate the organic reed vibration sound generation process and electric manipulation and amplification of the sound. The instrument would provide a suite of on-board tools and would “get out of its own way” during performance – no tripping over microphone stands, fiddling with outboard effect patching or trying to double lines with a synthesizer to make a custom “modern” sound. Instead, the musician would have these options built into the instrument itself and these processes would be integrated into act of playing. Sonny Stitt was a daring experimenter and a believer in this idea. He was able to make some interesting music with this instrument despite its many technical limitations.

The overarching goals of the WordPress admin has seemed to me to be similar – integrate the content creation process with the web publishing and layout process such that the tools “get out of the way” and creative workflow is not only not compromised but at times enhanced. These are lofty goals and they are never achieved in one iteration. Many of the problems that were so difficult to solve for the Varitone would be trivial to solve now but others are still persist. I own a digital piano that is in many ways a superior instrument to most analog pianos, yet at times it still is not a real piano and then it fails badly. Technology is not cool in and of itself but only if it improves something. Sometimes complex technology goes largely unnoticed because it is so well integrated into something that someone already does. WordPress 3.3 is an important release because it smooths out a lot of rough admin usability edges, gets out of the publisher’s way more than ever, and makes it more fun to publish stuff. Sonny would enjoy playing with his release namesake I am sure.